"[The] stock market: a loser across the board. It was a loser early, it stayed a loser and became a bigger loser as the day went on," Dylan summed up Thursday's trading with that one statement, as AIG and Wal-mart lead the Dow's one-day, 225-point dive. A few lone tech stocks were the only winners in an otherwise distressed market. Adding to the bearish environment was the morning's new jobless claim numbers, the highest reported in several months.

It's always a crapshoot what comes out of Cisco Systems' CEO John Chambers' mouth, and he's in the rare position of being able to utter a single word or phrase that could buoy or blast an investor's portfolio.

Jill Smart, an Accenture executive, was skeptical the first time she stepped into her firm’s new videoconferencing room in Chicago for a meeting with a group of colleagues in London. But the videoconferencing technology, known as telepresence, delivered an experience so lifelike, Ms. Smart recalled, that “10 minutes into it, you forget you are not in the room with them,” The New York Times reported.

The week was a mixed bag of economic and market news, most of it on the negative side. Oil prices continued to hit record highs, the market officially entered bear territory and the European Central Bank socked it to the U.S. by raising rates a quarter-point. Despite all of this, CNBC guests found bright spots in steel, financials, tech and international stocks.

This might be more a leap of faith, but it's a leap worth considering for both Intel and Apple, especially after the blogs have been awash this week about speculation over Intel's resistance to upgrade 80,000 employee computers to Microsoft's Vista.

Oracle ended 2007 as the software stock pick of the year for a few key analysts on the Street for 2008, and today we'll get a good idea as to whether those optimistic outlooks are still justified. Just about everyone I've talked to expects Oracle to beat expectations, so it doesn't seem like a question of "if," but instead, "by how much."

Wall Street can be a fickle place, and as investors wonder where they ought to park their money while they ride out the economic volatility gripping the country right now, they may want to harken back to some oldies but goodies: Apple Inc., Google, Research in Motion and Amazon.

The week began with a flashback to the credit crisis. It ended with figures showing the fastest inflation in six months and the lowest consumer-sentiment reading in 28 years. Along the way, as the stock market ebbed and flowed, CNBC guests assembled a collective portfolio that was heavy on technology, energy, and global exposure.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest computer maker, launched a new generation of PCs on Tuesday that respond to users tapping or stroking the screen, potentially bringing user-friendly computing to the masses.